The top-level element in MathML is <math>. Every valid MathML instance must be wrapped in <math> tags. In addition you must not nest a second <math> element in another, but you can have an arbitrary number of other child elements in it.

Attributes

In addition to the following attributes, the <math> element accepts any attributes of the <mstyle> element.

Notes: XHTML documents with MathML must be served as application/xhtml+xml. You can achieve that easily by adding the .xhtml extension to your local files. For Apache servers you can configure your .htaccess file to map extensions to the correct Mime type. Since you notate your MathML in an XML document, also be sure you write a well-formed XML document.

Firefox-specific notes

Firefox 7 introduced support for accepting all MathML attributes on the top-level math element (i.e. the same behavior as a <mstyle> element). However, the displaystyle attribute was not taken into account and has been added in Firefox 8.

A textual fall-back (alttext) or referring to an alternative image using the attributes altimg, altimg-width, altimg-height or altimg-valign is currently not implemented in Firefox.